2. Constructing the Proto-Terrorist
I was drafting this book, in May 2022, when news broke out about the death of fourteen-year-old Rezwan Kohistani. Rezwan had been found dead, hanging from a tree in a field behind Webb City High School in Missouri. He had arrived in Missouri with his family just four months earlier, fleeing the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan that was precipitated by the withdrawal of American armed forces from the country in 2021. His father had spent years distributing fuel to Americans and was able to catch an overcrowded flight arranged as part of American rescue effort.1 The family was resettled in the rural town of Oronogo by a government subcontractor. Oronogo, according to U.S. census data, is over 90 percent white.2 There were no Afghan families for miles.3 Rezwan’s school had never enrolled a refugee before; it did not have any Dari translators on staff.
The Missouri chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights watchdog, issued a statement suggesting that Rezwan had been subjected to anti-Muslim and racist bullying. The school denied those claims. The county coroner initially ruled his death a suicide by hanging, though he later abstained from reiterating that in the final report, saying that the investigation was ongoing. The reaction on Twitter to the initial ruling was scathing. As @Sammerstein put it, “People of color do not commit suicide by hanging themselves from trees.”4 When another Twitter user questioned @Sammerstein’s interpretation, she elaborated: “Bc that’s how lynchings get covered up in this country historically. 100% mental health is not taken serious in this country and people need access but saying an outdoor hanging in a place he was extremely bullied [w]as a suicide with no further investigation is sus af.”5 Other commentators saw Rezwan’s death as a lesson in intimidation. That is, of course, what a lynching is and does: beyond killing the targeted individual, it leaves behind a tortured body to remind a nonwhite public of its unbelonging. That in these social media posts the lens of lynching was used for a Brown body signals that anti-Black and anti-Brown violence in America can overlap in form and methods.
While we may not ever know for certain whether Rezwan’s death was a suicide or a lynching—as of June 2023, the investigation was still ongoing6—there is good reason to believe that he was bullied for “contaminating” a predominantly white space. During Ramadan, his classmates made fun of him for not eating during lunch; he sometimes came home crying.7 Teasing and bullying, in such a context, can imply an intention to exclude him from the social life of the community, and even from the community itself. Indeed, bullied kids often leave the schools where they have been made miserable; the teen suicides that result from bullying constitute a particularly tragic form of that leaving. And an actual lynching, if that was indeed Rezwan’s fate, might thus be understood as a more violent and direct expression of exclusionary intent.
The question we must ask is: Why and how did a Muslim boy from Afghanistan arrive in a mostly white, rural town of Missouri in the first place? That people like Rezwan are now on American soil is directly linked to the long American war in Afghanistan, a war in which many working-class white American soldiers and servicemembers also died or were wounded. But instead of an alliance between rural Americans and Afghan refugees, we see misdirected rage and efforts to punish someone who is considered a threat to the dominant group. This tragic episode thus prompts us to think about how a long phase of U.S. military intervention in Muslim countries is both provoked by and then (unfairly) provokes U.S.-based anti-Muslim anger, and why and how that anger points to Muslim boys in particular. The warfare industry both needs and creates anti-Muslim sentiment. In an alternate reality we might see poor, white, rural families of soldiers and ex-soldiers perceiving themselves in the same boat as the refugees, as co-victims of the military-industrial complex. But capitalism works hard to achieve enmity between these two groups lest they join together against a system that actually injures both.
In this chapter, I begin by first situating Rezwan’s experience in the context of American empire and elaborate on how foreign wars have reshaped notions of risk and threat within the U.S. I then turn my attention to two sites—educational institutions and national borders—to outline some of the discursive practices through which Muslim boys are conjured as “proto-terrorists,” a figuration that helps fuel the American war economy.
American Warfare Capitalism
Afghan refugees are seeking asylum in the United States because they are fleeing the repercussions of a protracted U.S.-sponsored war in Afghanistan and past American decisions to fund extremist organizations in the country of their birth. Tens of thousands of Afghans—Rezwan’s family among them—flowed out of Afghanistan in 2021 in direct and painful consequence of the trillions of U.S. dollars and the hundred thousand U.S. troops that formerly flooded in, largely to promote U.S. geopolitical interests. Back in the 1970s, America and Saudi Arabia funneled billions of dollars to the mujahidin (literally, those who engage in struggle) in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. Most of these funds and weapons—and not coincidentally—went to groups that espoused extremist interpretations of Islam, as religious rigidity seemed a bulwark against communist ideology.8 The ideology of jihad, described as holy war, was particularly instrumentalized and used by the United States and its allies to recruit Muslims across the world. After the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, civil war ensued among the Afghan factions; from that struggle eventually emerged the Afghan Taliban, who came to power in 1996 with U.S. support. U.S.-Afghan relations turned sour when the Taliban refused to hand over Osama bin Laden, who had established his base in Afghanistan and whom U.S. authorities deemed responsible for the 9/11 attacks. In 2001, the United States, together with NATO forces, began a military operation in Afghanistan that lasted two decades.
According to the Cost of War project at Brown University, the war wreaked havoc in Afghanistan: food insecurity increased from 62 percent (pre-2001) to 92 percent (in 2022), the percentage of children under five experiencing acute malnutrition increased from 9 percent to 50 percent, and the share of Afghans living in poverty increased from 80 percent to 97 percent. By the end of 2021, an estimated 4.3 million Afghans had been internally displaced. In 2022, there were 1.5 million Afghans living with disabilities (largely related to military action) and two million widows. The displacement and dispossession of Afghans was profitable for the United States and its allies, for both public entities and private companies.9 War economies thrive on new wars, which create jobs for the military and its contractors, fund new weapons projects, and are used to justify building new prisons. Of the fourteen trillion total dollars Pentagon spent on the war in Afghanistan, one-third to one-half went to military contractors, especially to U.S.-based weapons contractors (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman), which together received over $286 billion in contracts in 2019 and 2020 alone.10 Over the twenty years of war in Afghanistan, other weapons manufacturers, logistics and reconstruction firms like KBR and Bechtel, and armed private security contractors like Blackwater and Dyncorp, also profited.11
U.S. mining interests were another under-discussed factor in the prolonged U.S. presence that ultimately upended Rezwan’s life in Afghanistan. Whether commissioning exploratory surveys or pressuring the Afghan government to deliver access to foreign corporations, the United States was particularly interested in Afghanistan’s mineral deposits: rare-earth minerals, lithium, and copper with a value estimated at one to three trillion dollars.12 In 2017, Trump and Ghani agreed to mining contracts that gave beneficial treatment to U.S. companies.13 While then U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross used the language of development and self-reliance to discuss these mining ventures (“The whole idea of it is to try to figure out how to make Afghanistan a self-sufficient country that can provide jobs for its people and its own budget,” he said), President Trump eyed the minerals as an opportunity to recoup U.S. spending on war: “As the prime minister of Afghanistan has promised, we are going to participate in economic development to help defray the cost of this war to us.”14
When American troops exited in 2021, Afghanistan was again taken over by the Taliban. Of the thousands of Afghans who fled the country in its immediate aftermath only a limited number have been able to find asylum; others are still waiting. More than 76,000 Afghans were evacuated to the United States, but most were admitted under the humanitarian parole provision, a temporary protected status that allows them to work and live but bears an expiration date and does not lead to lawful permanent residence.15 Afghans who received humanitarian parole have to apply for other forms of immigration or return to the country from where they came. The path to full residency for these Afghans remains uncertain, lengthy, and difficult. In contrast, pathways such as refugee or special immigrant visas are supported by federal funds and lead to lawful residence. Afghan refugees struggle with everyday life challenges: they may not be able to speak English; they may experience bullying and other discrimination; they may be living in poverty.
The United States is thus now home not only to tens of thousands of military combat veterans who fought outside the United States in a War on Terror broadly conceptualized as foreign, but also to tens of thousands of refugees displaced from regions where the U.S. military brought its acts of war. Rezwan arrived in Missouri as the result of a war that can be linked directly to American intervention, war economies, and capitalist extraction. Displaced by U.S.–sponsored state violence in places many of them used to call home, Muslim boys like Rezwan are now bullied, surveilled, and detained in the United States as an extension of this war activity. The impacts of American wars are thus not limited to territories and peoples outside America; they can be felt domestically as well.
Beyond the U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan, the broader “war on terror” has inaugurated many changes to domestic security—in particular, the collapse into each other of military and police authority, two manifestations of state-authorized violence that had previously been separated for use against threats either foreign or domestic. We see this conflation in a new dispensation of sharing between institutions like the FBI and the CIA, in the recycling of combat equipment from the military to local police forces, and in special programs that give local law-enforcement entities access to discounted federal prices on items like rifles, helicopters, and Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles.16 This expansion of the security regime relies on the construction of an ongoing threat, which keeps America, in David Theo Goldberg’s words, on a “permanent war footing.”17 It presumes, writes Goldberg, “that nations are now under constant attack from rogue forces, antistatists, quasi states, and terrorists . . . The projection of constant threat or possibility of violent events is taken to require not just vigilance but perpetual preparation.”18 The construction of threat and risk that have kept America on a permanent war footing is ultimately a domestic project. Some elements of this project are visible in American schools and at our borders.
Constructing the Proto-Terrorist
In 2016, a seven-year-old Muslim boy Abdul Aziz was kicked and punched in the aisle of his school bus as his classmates talked of him as Muslim and Pakistani; his older brothers in the past had been called “terrorists.”19 That same year when two Muslim teens were attacked outside a mosque in Brooklyn, their assailant reportedly shouted, “You f**king terrorist” and “You Muslims are the cause of all the problems of the world.”20 Pia Rebello Britto finds that the years following 9/11 saw an increase in reports of discrimination, bullying, and exclusion of Arab Muslim children.21 And in the incidents considered above we note the incessant marking of Muslim boys as “terrorists,” a framing that is not applied to nonwhite boys as a group. Insults like “terrorist” and “Go back to where you came from,” are speech acts through which that which threatens the self and identity is subjugated; and an illusion of purity, homogeneity, and integrity is reestablished.
The figure of the terrorist is made comprehensible in the West today through recourse to longstanding ideas about monstrosity: this association has been carefully explored by scholars including Sophia Arjana, Farzana Shain, Amit Rai, and Jasbir Puar.22 Arjana meticulously examines the depiction of Muslims as monsters in medieval European literature; Shain highlights the trope of the folk devil as it has been applied to Muslim men in England since the mid-1980s; Rai and Puar draw on Foucault’s discussion of abnormality to examine the construction of the Muslim terrorist-monster. These ideas about monstrosity are helpful in understanding the conceptualization of “terrorist” as a persona of adult Muslim men.23
But when we consider Muslim boys, two further “abnormal” figures identified by Foucault become useful: the individual to be corrected and the masturbating child.24 Of the three figures Foucault uses to describe the domain of abnormality as it developed in the West during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—between medieval laws and the discourses of psychiatry—the monstrous may be least relevant to the construction of Muslim boyhood. Foucault considers the “individual to be corrected” in relation to discipline, and the “masturbating child” to understand how deviant behaviors come to be located in the body as pathology. As figures targeted for different forms of power, these archetypes may also help us understand how the modern system of correction and punishment comes into being.25 Specifically, Foucault writes about the emergence of a new kind of psychiatric knowledge and its associated experts, whose purpose is not to cure patients but to provide testimony so that society can be protected from those patients. The psychiatrist thus appears in the courtroom, and the focus of testimony shifts from “crime committed (an actual crime) to crime that could be committed (potential crime).”26 In this way, modern systems of correction and punishment bring together juridical and psychiatric discourses to punish infractions—and also to predict or detect them.
Foucault’s framing is relevant to our discussion of Muslim boyhood because it helps us recognize the numerous disciplinary interventions aimed at Muslim boys as not simply corrective but as diagnostic, aimed at identifying the proto-terrorist and anticipating or thwarting crime before it happens. That is the framing proposed by Tom Ridge, appointed to lead the new Department of Homeland Security created as part of the massive U.S. response to 9/11: “It’s not a question of if, but when.”27 For someone like Ridge, who seems to “know” that a terror attack will take place on U.S. soil—and who sees himself as charged to prevent that attack—it’s only a short conceptual step from when to who. In a world where terrorist proclivities are increasingly naturalized as pathologies and located in the body (as is described in Amit Rai and Jasbir Puar’s work), boyhood becomes the developmental stage in which these pathologies are ideally detected. In other words, while Muslim men may be terrorists, Muslim boys are imagined as terrorists-in-the-making or proto-terrorists. This framing is politically useful as it makes tomorrow’s terrorism visible today, albeit in an inchoate form. As Todd Ramlow notes, in order to defuse any threat to the social order presented by a cultural other, the threat must first be made visible:28 visibility and manageability go together. The proto-terrorist concretizes threat by making it visible and thus creates an opportunity for the security regime to manage it. The state then enters the lives of Muslim boys through commensurate technologies of monitoring, surveillance, quarantine, suspension, and abandonment.
The construction, detection, and management of Muslim boys as proto-terrorists—where it is most readily differentiated from the management of Black and Brown youth more generally—can be seen in American educational institutions and at U.S. national borders. While prisons are a paradigmatic site of incarceration and slow death for Black youth and adult men, at the additional sites of schools and borders we gain insight into how nonwhite—and particularly Brown Muslim—bodies experience carcerality in ways that are both like and unlike the experiences of Black Muslims or U.S. Black populations in general. At check-in, TSA screening, and customs lines at airports, and in detention rooms and surveillance programs implemented at schools and colleges, we see additional acts of enclosure that particularly target Brown Muslim populations.
Monitoring the “Leakage” at Schools
The FBI describes its involvement in schools as part of a broader strategy to address violent extremism via local partnerships. The rather surprising idea that a federal agency dedicated to the investigation of complex crimes has a reason to speak directly to U.S. middle and high schools should be read against the many changes to domestic security inaugurated by the War on Terror. In a 2010 national security strategy, such involvements were deemed a key “defense” against “the threat to the United States”:
Several recent incidences of violent extremists in the United States who are committed to fighting here and abroad have underscored the threat to the United States and our interests posed by individuals radicalized at home. Our best defenses against this threat are well informed and equipped families, local communities, and institutions. The Federal Government will invest in intelligence to understand this threat and expand community engagement and development programs to empower local communities.29
A 2011 White House report, “Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States,” follows up with particular interest in schools and youth agencies. Staff at these entities can “help identify causes, recommend appropriate responses, and select activities for local implementation.”30 The terms “threat,” “threats,” and “threatening” appear nineteen times in this eight-page document, and while domestic extremists and hate crimes are mentioned, the document’s repeated mentions of al-Qa’ida make clear where the authors see that “threat” most concretely located. From the existence of a general threat, the report turns its attention to Muslims, who may surveil their communities on behalf of the state: “Communities—especially Muslim American communities whose children, families, and neighbors are being targeted for recruitment by al-Qa’ida—are often best positioned to take the lead because they know their communities best.”31 Even while asking communities to monitor the behavior of their own youth, law enforcement agencies view outreach to schools as a key aspect of community policing strategy. In a federally funded 2014 survey of U.S. law enforcement agencies (whose combined jurisdictions covered eighty-six percent of the U.S. population), 45.2 percent of the agencies described presentations at schools as a commonly used community policing strategy.32
The FBI sees school personnel as key agents for identifying “catalysts that drive violent extremism”—an opportunity to enlist school staff as observers of a surveilled student population, and specifically of students who belong to risk groups.33 The 2016 FBI report “Preventing Violent Extremism in Schools” asks teachers, social workers, and school administrators to monitor students and report to law enforcement about any students deemed risky. This report on “extremism prevention” emphasizes adolescence as a chaotic developmental stage during which young people are “more susceptible to embracing violent extremist ideologies” and are prone to being influenced by underlying “risk factors” (such as family dynamics) and external stimuli (indoctrination).34 The FBI’s focus on unstable family dynamics and developmental stages is in line with a broader consensus within the field of terrorism studies that childhood circumstances are a crucial determining factor in whether an individual will be susceptible to recruitment into terrorist activities. As Rai and Puar have explained, terrorism experts often seek to uncover foundational moments in the construction of the terrorist psyche.35 The terrorist is assumed to have personality defects rooted in childhood experiences within the family—the individual may have grown up in a dysfunctional family, or might conversely rebel against society out of loyalty to parents perceived as injured.36 With terrorist proclivities lodged in his psyche, the proto-terrorist is an individual who, although he has not yet committed a crime, is certain to do so; he must therefore be monitored, not in the expectation that he might be educated or reformed out of his (inevitable) wrongdoing, but that he might be caught before the crime. Childhood and adolescence, as we see in the FBI report, thus come under intense scrutiny.
Having located terrorist proclivities in a youth’s or student’s psyche, the 2016 report further attempts to identify everyday practices that might hint at future criminal behavior. The FBI describes these as “leakage” or “common warning behavior for students advocating violence,” in an explicit reference to anticipated acts: “Leakage occurs when a student intentionally or unintentionally reveals clues to feelings, thoughts, fantasies, attitudes, or intentions that signal an impending act. These clues emerge as subtle threats, boasts, innuendos, predictions, or ultimatums and are conveyed in numerous forms (e.g. stories, diaries, journals, essays, poems, manifestos, letters, songs, drawings, and videos).”37 The long list of media and forms of expression that the report suggests can furnish insights into young people’s thoughts gives tacit permission to school personnel to monitor children’s activities in this broad range of contexts where “leakage” might happen—and where monitoring can thus detect future terrorism (or in the FBI’s language, “an impending act”).38
That teachers are asked to always be on the lookout for “leakage” or signs of criminality in students’ homework assignments, stated comments and opinions, or online activity helps to explain in part why Ahmed Mohamed’s English teacher thought that his homemade clock was a bomb. Popular culture could also be a driving factor. Television shows such as Homeland liberally feature the Islamic-figure-with-a-bomb-in-U.S.-domestic-setting scaremongering. Some of the pressure on teachers to watch out for “leakage” also comes from school shootings (most often perpetrated by someone inside the school, not usually for political reasons). Having reached—or leaped to—that conclusion, Ahmed’s teacher followed school and district procedure of informing the school principal and law enforcement, who hold the authority to bring the suspected student inside the carceral system. As the FBI report instructs, “Students and educators are encouraged to convey their concerns and observations to trusted community partners, school resource officers, or a local law enforcement entity.”39 The FBI has also reached out to students directly to enroll them in this endeavor. In 2016, it launched an interactive website aimed at teens—“Don’t Be a Puppet: Pull Back the Curtain on Violent Extremism”—that features colorful graphics, quizzes, videos, activities, and other materials “to teach teens how to recognize violent extremist messaging and become more resistant to self-radicalization and possible recruitment.”40 Students are thus encouraged to view their classmates with suspicion and participate in this project of surveillance.
Yet, the Muslim boy thus identified does not become Foucault’s “individual to be corrected.” He remains outside the system’s capacity to reform; his path to correction is not via education, but rather through expulsion and quarantine. Ahmed, for instance, was first questioned by the school principal and police officers in a closed room and then taken to a juvenile detention facility in handcuffs, where he was fingerprinted and interrogated without his parents present. He was eventually suspended from school for three days. Muslim boys, as proto-terrorists, lack the complexity of “at-risk” figures (who might be reformed) and are instead what Katharyne Mitchell terms as “pre-known risk failure[s].”41 While Mitchell writes about Black boys in particular, we can extend this framing to Muslim boys as well: instead of “at risk,” Muslim boys are “a risk.”
The search for “leakage” frequently manifests as bullying. In 2016, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a complaint with the Department of Justice requesting an investigation of Faye Myles, a teacher at a charter school in Phoenix, Arizona. The ACLU alleged Myles had repeatedly singled out, abused, and even physically assaulted a Muslim boy, A.A., then eleven years old and in the sixth grade. According to the complaint, Myles choked A.A. and then intimidated him into hiding the incident from his parents: “If you tell your mom, watch what happens next.”42 A.A. did inform his mother, who complained to the school, but Myles denied choking A.A. and the school reported that it had uncovered no wrongdoing. In the months following the alleged attack, Myles allegedly taunted A.A., even imagining him into the figure of proto-terrorist. After showing a video clip of events related to September 11, 2001, she told A.A., “That’s going to be you.” The complaint further describes a sweeping condemnation from Myles, in a moment when A.A. wanted to answer a question she had posed to the class: “All you Muslims think you are so smart . . . I can’t wait until Trump is elected. He’s going to deport all you Muslims. Muslims shouldn’t be given visas. They’ll probably take away your visa and deport you. You’re going to be the next terrorist, I bet.”43 These comments reiterate the close association between Muslimness and boyhood as a sign of future crime (“that’s going to be you” and “You’re going to be the next terrorist”) that I have been discussing thus far. Also worth noting is the teacher’s intuitive reference to borders and assumption of border security officers’ broad power to monitor and expel Muslim boys (“They’ll probably take away your visa and deport you”). That the bullying legitimized at school can spill over to other sites is evident in A.A.’s later harassment on the school bus by his peers, who had heard him shamed in the classroom, and now proceeded to call him a “terrorist.”44
“Leakage” and Imputed Abnormality
The proto-terrorist “leakage” that the FBI wants schools and community organizations to detect is ascribed by some psychologists and social workers to supposed abnormal sexual and emotional development among Muslim boys—an imputed abnormality that, in turn, purportedly manifests in rage and violence in adulthood. Foucault’s formulation of the masturbating child is thus a persuasive model for understanding how Muslim boys are pathologized: terrorist proclivities are lodged in their bodies. And, while all Muslim boys are constructed as proto-terrorists, family circumstances may render certain boys at greater risk of leaking or expressing the proto-terrorist nature that this “logic” would impose on them as a group.
Consider a mental health screening framework developed by psychologists Cyrus Ho, Tian Quek, Roger Ho, and Carol Choo. It focuses particular attention on social factors to identify patients at high risk for being involved in terrorist activity: “Family dysfunction; Friendship with radicalized individuals; Living in, or with close links to, an unstable geopolitical area; Unemployment or underemployment; No history of romantic relationships” (emphasis added).45 The suggestion that sexual frustration—an individual has not experienced proper sexual milestones—is a predictor for terrorist behavior echoes as a broader social trope in discussions of young Muslim men. Thus David Frum, former speechwriter for George W. Bush, could remark on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, “The Middle East is now a region of overpopulation and underemployment, where tens of millions of young men waste their lives in economic and sexual frustration.”46 Frum, as we shall see below, relies on specific Western stereotypes to assume the sexual frustration of young Muslim men in the Middle East and then uses that to explain their expected violence. A pattern of sexual rejection has been seen to have fueled a number of mass shootings by young white men,47 but when talking about Muslim boys, observers like Frum do not describe instances of individual psychological development or lack (as we would typically see emerge in conversations around mass shootings by white non-Muslim men). Instead, they project sexual frustration onto an entire cohort based on a Western interpretation of the social effects of growing up in an Islamic culture. As Amit Rai observes, biographical accounts of terrorists written by Western journalists similarly focus on deviations from presumably normal childhoods that lead to later sexual frustration or excesses.48 Journalist Adam Robinson presents Osama bin Laden as a normal child until his father’s death, after which he loses himself in “hedonistic pleasures”:
The only son of a mother who immediately fell out of favor with his father; the urge to please, to impress, to be accepted were driving forces in his childhood. His father’s death when he was ten years old seems to have unhinged him and, from then on, he swung crazily like an ever-more dangerous wrecker’s ball from one obsessive attachment to another. At first, the only person he damaged was himself: living in the world of books, he cut himself off from the world that his brothers and sisters inhabited. Then he swung in the opposite direction, losing himself in hedonistic pleasures abroad as only one with unlimited funds can do.49
In this framing we see not only a troubled childhood marked by one parent’s outsider status and the death of the other, but also an aberrant sexuality—here denoted by “hedonistic pleasures,” differently aberrant to the “no history of romantic relationships” we see on the list of terrorism social risk factors above and yet similarly linking terrorism and sexual frustration.
Young Muslim men as a group, then, are either sexually deprived or oversexed. This contradictory knowledge ultimately turns the subject into someone who is incapable of managing personal emotions and desires, sexual or otherwise. The binary framing in turn relies on the dual depiction of Muslim societies in the Western imaginary: on the one hand, Muslim societies are marked by polygamy (harnessing fantasies about men who have unrestrained access to women); on the other hand, images of all-male madrasas evoke imaginings of a gender-segregated Muslim society where men grow up in homosocial spaces, with few or limited encounters with women. These contradictory conceptualizations—sexual overindulgence/unrestrained access to women and sexual frustration/no access to women—defy reconciliation, although their parallel existence is politically useful. Depending on the circumstances and audience, each can be mobilized to evoke politically powerful fears.
The Polish magazine wSieci panders to these fears in its 2016 cover story on the “Islamic Rape of Europe” (Figure 1): white, blond, female Europe, draped in the flag of the European Union, is terrified at being groped by brown, hairy arms. The image’s tight cropping invites the viewer to imagine outside its frame oversexed/sexed-deprived migrant Muslim men who view women simply as vessels for their pleasure, to be discarded upon use. The underlying assumption here is that white, secular men will respect sexual boundaries, while Muslim men will not; that they will be unable to control their sexual appetites as the result of childhoods characterized by an “abnormality” that is framed as both familial and religious.
Figure 1. wSieci magazine cover, “Islamic Rape of Europe,” 2016.
The idea that Muslim men threaten the sexual chastity of white women is widespread, and appears in the American context as well. In a 2017 interview, a suspect who had attacked a Muslim cab driver in Minnesota justified his assault by saying: “You tell me, do you not know what these Muslims will do with a white American girl?”50 Likewise, on a recent visit to Atlanta, during a conversation about a different research project, I learned about the entrapment of a young Muslim man by the police in a case that again assumes deviant desires. The incident was relayed to me by his friend:
So, I know this guy, twenty-year-old, a new migrant from Pakistan. He joined a chat channel or whatever and met a girl there. They decided to meet. When he got to the diner, she turned out to be a cop! Can you imagine that? He was arrested because the girl said she was seventeen or something. Like the cop who was being the girl. The dude from Pakistan didn’t know anything about age laws probably. So he was arrested. He is in jail now. The lawyer told him to confess. He is in jail for one year. Can you imagine that?
The young man’s surprise at this entrapment was exacerbated by the fact that: “She had contacted him. Like, I mean, the cop had contacted him. So that’s just messed up. Why would you do that to a poor guy? He is now withering away in jail.” The police in this story seem to have enticed the young Pakistani man based on the expectation that he would be looking to prey on underage girls.
Catching Muslims boys before they commit a crime thus becomes an imperative for both state actors and proxies—teachers, fellow students, and even ordinary citizens. The New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign, launched in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and transformed into a nationwide anti-terrorism movement by Department of Homeland Security in 2010, turns every citizen into someone who should engage in surveillance on behalf of the state.51
Surveillance as a Mobile Penitentiary
Explaining terrorism via individual pathology focuses attention on childhood experiences and hides the political reality that terrorism may well be driven by state and capitalist interests. It presents disciplinary and surveillance regimes such as the FBI’s Preventing Violent Extremism program as ideal modes of intervention, while ignoring their racial prejudice. An administrative technique like watching out for “leakage,” when directed against an at-risk/risk population that is numerically dominated by people who are Black and Brown, becomes another form of racial violence, no matter how loudly that technique is proclaimed to be routine or race-neutral. Entering the geography of the school can be a demoralizing experience for nonwhite students who are targeted daily for these surveillance procedures. And while nonwhite students from a range of backgrounds may perceive such monitoring and surveillance in largely similar ways, association with Muslimness—signified in the Western imagination by dress, accents, immigration status, or Brownness—means that Muslim boys (and girls) are enclosed by schools in ways that other students are not. Educator and community organizer Debbie Almontaser describes the significant anxiety over surveillance that she has observed among some Muslim high school students, and suggests that they may feel even worse if they knew its true extent:
I spoke to high school juniors and seniors and [the issue of surveillance] came up. I asked them what they’ve been paying attention to politically. One of the kids said “NYPD spying.” Another asked me do I think they’re spying on us in school? I didn’t want to freak the kids out, but the NYPD (via NYPD School Safety Agents) has access to surveillance cameras installed by the DOE (Department of Education) within the last several years inside middle and high school buildings. Live footage can be viewed from DOE Borough Centers.52
Schools are where many boys routinely encounter the carceral state. Thus, members of the focus groups I conducted in New York in 2017 to discuss the arrest of Ahmed Mohamed often moved rapidly from his encounter with the police to their own experiences with metal detectors and school safety officers. One participant described how routine surveillance can collide with bias:
Whenever anything goes off—like if I am walking through scanning, as soon as I walk through scanning here [at school], let’s say I have a simple penny—they are like instantly like, I heard one officer go ‘just search him.’ And they were like doing me like way more, more so because of, maybe the jacket or something. It was a lot more, more intense than if they were like checking someone else . . . I even took out the penny and offered to walk back in to just show it was a penny but they were like “no.”
While female students are also disciplined, boys cited the comparative fragility of girls’ bodies to explain why authorities saw them as less capable of participating in or enduring violence. When I asked my focus group participants about what might have happened if a girl, not a boy, had brought the homemade alarm clock to school, they said, “They would have been more soft on her. They probably would not have arrested her . . .” and “They would have been more lenient. She would have had more chances to explain herself.” Nadir agreed with this view: “It would have been less . . . usually they fear that boys would do something and not females. So, they like they put them at different levels basically. If a boy did it, obviously, they would be scared because of how they perceive it . . . they perceive boys as harmful and harsh and stuff. And they perceive females as kind and calm and not like they would do anything like that.” Riaz suggested further that gender shielded girls: “Girls are treated [a] little more sensitive[ly] because of the feminist movements that are going on right now. They would not really want to attack her because that would be the first thing people will bring up besides race.” Imtiaz’s comments similarly hint at the ways that gender stereotypes shape nonwhite boys’ experiences in a society that adopts surveillance as a tool: “Sometimes your masculinity poses as a threat to others . . . so like, people look at men, some people do, as strong gender and they automatically think we will attack, do violence, like make bombs, use weapons than females . . .”
The boys in my group interview recognized, however, that race complicates this otherwise clear script of how girls experience school surveillance and its related discipline. Saleh saw room for a differentiated response, depending on the specific attributes of the hypothetical clock-making girl: “I think it depends on what the girl looks like. Like if she looked like a nice schoolgirl, like a skirt, and a white, like Catholic schoolgirl [everyone laughs] . . .” When Saleh invokes the stereotype of Catholic schoolgirls, he equates “nice” with being white, blond, and female. Such remarks are reminiscent of the broader cultural equivalence of whiteness and blondness with innocence, as we also saw in the BBC News coverage of Ukrainian refugees in chapter 1. Even schools that intentionally seek to create a welcoming and inclusive environment for immigrant students, according to Roozbeh Shirazi’s study, end up making it contingent on them affirming white indigeneity, upholding the superiority of the United States, and limiting conversations about structural racism.53 It is unsurprising then that many of my high school interlocutors felt that a nonwhite girl would not experience the same softness and forgiveness as a white girl.
In fact, across all five focus groups, my participants agreed that a girl who was visibly similar to Ahmed in race and religion (signified by the hijab) would likely undergo the same treatment—or even worse. One of my interlocutors suggested that it is probably because law officials assume that the girl would lead them to the real terrorists. In this framing, while girls’ stronger visual association with Islam means that stereotypes associating Islam with terrorist violence could attach more powerfully to them, it is still boys/men who are considered the actual perpetrators or perpetrators-in-development. The interrogation of girls becomes a means to an end.54
The monitoring and surveillance of Muslim students is, if anything, intensified when they go to college. In 2001, the New York Police Department (NYPD) began a Muslim Surveillance and Mapping Program, which would continue until 2014. The NYPD sent informants to gather information in mosques, Muslim student groups, and Muslim-owned businesses in New York City and in nearby states. Included in this surveillance were thirty-one Muslim student associations (MSAs) on college campuses, of which seven were labeled “MSAs of concern.” These included MSAs at Baruch College, Hunter College, La Guardia Community College, City College, Brooklyn College, St. John’s University, and Queens College. According to the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility project at CUNY School of Law, NYPD also went into high schools and had a list of private Islamic schools “of interest.”55 The effect of this kind of close and sustained surveillance on Muslim communities can be devastating, constricting life and social relations. We can, in fact, see surveillance as a form of enclosure—and its life-stifling impacts as potentially analogous to those of the prison (as a recognized site of Black slow death).56 This feeling of constriction is palpable in Asad Dandia’s reflections on being targeted by an NYPD informant connected to its Muslim surveillance program.
In 2012 Dandia, then nineteen years old and studying at a community college in Brooklyn, was befriended by a young man over Facebook who wanted to get involved in Dandia’s community-based charitable work. Dandia introduced him to colleagues and even invited him home for a meal. The young man later revealed himself to be an informant for the NYPD. Dandia was placed under surveillance because of his charitable work through an organization called Fesabeelillah Services of NYC, dedicated to serving low-income Muslims and non-Muslims alike. When the news of NYPD surveillance broke out in the media, it created intense confusion and mistrust among Muslims. Dandia recalls: “Mosques became even more anxious that newcomers were sent by the police. A chill swept through cafes and other businesses. Nobody knew whom to trust and people grew more afraid to voice their views openly. The world felt like it was closing in on us—because it was.”57 The feeling of lacking freedom, of being locked-in, is evident in Dandia’s comments. He also worried about the borders, another site where surveillance and constriction are acutely felt. Dandia writes: “My mother wants to visit family in Pakistan this year, yet I’m afraid of what she might face at the airport . . . I, too, am scared to travel internationally—could I one day be refused reentry into the country of my birth?”58 As we learned from the five-year-old Muslim boy’s experience at Dulles, Dandia’s trepidations were not without merit.
Suspension and Abandonment at the Borders
Returning to Sean Spicer’s attempt to justify arresting a five-year-old Muslim boy at Dulles—“To assume that just because of someone’s age and gender that they don’t pose a threat would be misguided and wrong”—we can now appreciate his statement in new light: it is both constituted by, and constitutes, ideas about Muslim boys as proto-terrorists. When Donald Trump became president in 2017, one of his first acts was to issue executive order (EO 13769) “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.” It was in the context of this order—which imposed a ninety-day ban restricting foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries from visiting the United States, suspended entry of all Syrian refugees indefinitely, and prohibited any other refugees from coming into the country for 120 days—that the five-year-old boy ended up detained in a Washington airport.
The ban was a reminder of older widely supported exclusionary laws, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese laborers from migrating to the United States on the grounds that they “endanger the good order of certain localities”59 and the 1917 Barred Zone Act, which prevented Asian immigration altogether. Immigration restrictions were reduced significantly from the 1960s onward. But Trump’s ban signaled a reversal. Even as the ACLU and the Council on American-Islamic Relations challenged Trump’s 2017 executive order in court, the order received support, particularly among white evangelical Protestants, according to a study by the Pew Research Center.60 While Joe Biden ended the ban in January 2021, Donald Trump started off his 2024 presidential primary campaign with claims that if reelected he would reinstate and increase the scope of the travel ban. In a statement made before a predominantly white audience in Council Bluffs, Iowa, Trump said: “When I return to office, the travel ban is coming back even bigger than before and much stronger than before. We don’t want people blowing up our shopping centers.”61 In this ideological project, the five-year-old boy at Dulles is a harbinger of the adult man who blows up shopping centers.
The presence or risk of violence determines how a structure that at first glance is undifferentiated—in this case, a border zone—can be experienced differently by differently coded bodies. Helga Tawil-Souri reminds us that the experience and temporality of the border is subjective.62 Racially marked bodies experience a given border space as difficult, slow, and unpredictable; in contrast, white bodies experience the same spacetime as rapid and predictable.63 In international airports and other points of entry, the carceral practices of surveillance expand to contain and enclose nonwhite bodies in a liminal experience of permission to enter. Here, nonwhite bodies encounter state violence through proxies such as customs and patrol agents. Saher Selod argues that the “random” selection of people of color for searches and stops during state-led screening initiatives in airports in fact relies on “religious cues”—hijabs, beards, Arabic language, Muslim-sounding names—to determine who is a threat.64 Fellow passengers, flight attendants, and pilots may also discriminate based on these same cues. Selod enumerates numerous instances of racialized surveillance: Muslim imams and women in hijab, and even a twelve-year-old Muslim boy, escorted off airplanes and interrogated, and released only after authorities determined they actually posed no threat.65
What stands out most in Selod’s study of the experience of Muslims at airports is the indignity that they experience during pat-downs, stops, and searches, as these necessarily become public spectacles. Even though most of those stopped are soon released, the public performance of power is the point; it is through such performances that the state convinces onlookers of its own authority and necessity (as I have argued elsewhere in a discussion about state power).66 Selod’s interlocutors repeatedly shared feelings of humiliation, as did my interlocutors.67 One of my focus group participants from Bangladesh recounted his father’s harassment at the airport where he was held back for hours (more in chapter 4). Another young man recalled his experience at an airport security checkpoint: “[The agent] was super aggressive for no reason. I felt violated. I was shaking for hours after that incident.” It is not surprising that, when possible, young Muslim men often prefer taking buses, which means enduring the inconvenience of a long, difficult trip in order to avoid the routinized surveillance of U.S. airports.68
Even the well-documented migrant crisis at the southwestern U.S. border—though its impacts are felt most powerfully by people migrating north from Mexico and Central America and which we don’t ordinarily think about in relation to Muslims—has intensified partly due to the militarization of U.S. immigration policy in the wake of 9/11.69 Longstanding prejudice against Latinx people is being shaped by new rumors about Muslim terrorists in South America to justify harsher treatment of Latinx migrants. Rumors have circulated that ISIS was setting up terror cells in Mexico, and in January 2019 Trump tweeted that a border rancher had found prayer rugs in New Mexico.70 The fear of Muslims and associating Latinx border-crossers with Islam appears to be an effective tool for gaining public support around even harsher treatment of those migrants and asylum seekers. Indeed, during the Trump administration the United States saw a vast expansion in the detention of children at the borders. According to the Marshall Project, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection carried out thousands of child detentions a day, a total of almost half a million between 2016 and 2020.71 A 2019 report from the Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog noted “dangerous overcrowding and prolonged detention of children and adults in the Rio Grande Valley.”72 Rampant abuse by Customs and Border Protection officers, Border Patrol agents, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials has been reported for over a decade now.73 Thus, even though the migrant crisis at the southwestern U.S. border might at first glance appear to be distinct from the discourse of terrorism linked to the Muslim ban, it is nonetheless connected when we recognize it as yet another manifestation of xenophobia that has long marked the Muslim condition in the United States.
In fact, in the last few years the southwestern border has become an entry point for increasing numbers of Muslims as they flee wars in the Middle East and Central Asia, as well as Russian military conscription. Even then Muslims make up less than 5 percent of border crossers. However, an investigation by LA Times revealed that for an eighteen-month period beginning in October 2021, 60 percent of those who were prosecuted by the U.S. attorney’s office in Del Rio (under the failure-to-report law) were from Muslim-majority countries, including Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, and Mali.74 Such a disproportionate state response should be by now as unsurprising to my readers as it is regrettable.
Enclosing the Muslim Boy
In outlining the different discursive regimes within which Muslim boyhood takes shape, this chapter has suggested that bullying, monitoring, suspension, abandonment, and surveillance in schools and colleges, and at airports and borders, should be understood as belonging to a broader carceral ecology that produces Muslim boys as a threat: as terrorists-in-development or proto-terrorists. Recognizing this landscape helps nuance our understanding of how Muslim boys are pinned against matrices where overlapping yet distinct histories and practices of racialization are arrayed. For the fourteen-year-old clockmaker Ahmed, who is of Sudanese descent, threat is attached to both phenotype and religion, conjoining two longstanding discourses of difference: recall that my high school interlocutors immediately recognized gender, race, and religion as independent and overlapping factors in the school’s overreaction to Ahmed’s invention and their projection of what might happen to other (hypothetical) clockmakers. For Muslim boys categorized as white under U.S. federal census standards, like the five-year-old of Iranian descent whose airport detention Spicer tried to justify, fears related to national security—here, fear of Iran—can combine with other cultural markers, such as accents or food and clothing choices, to limit access to whiteness. The harassment of that young boy at the border reveals what Neda Maghbouleh describes as the volatility and fickleness of whiteness in relation to racially liminal groups.75 But whiteness, as Patrick Casey has pointed out, can also shield white Muslims from prejudice—and Casey’s conclusions about the countervailing impact of Muslim religious clothing dovetail with my high school students’ intuitive sense that a girl who wore the hijab would be treated differently than a white Catholic schoolgirl.76 When observing the Muslim experience in the United States, these categories of difference (gender, race, religion) cannot be neatly separated and are more helpfully understood as constellations whose relation to the center (Deleuze and Guattari’s “White-Man face”) shifts according to the context.
Nor can the complex experience of living as a Muslim boy in the United States be readily separated from the circumstances of perpetual war footing and the capitalist interests that fuel it. In an environment of constant fear—harnessed by beliefs that Muslim boys are proto-terrorists—militarization necessarily follows. This militarization is visible in the growth of the Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) workforce, expansion of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and the buildup of weapons for domestic peacekeeping purposes. Within three years of launching its CVE initiative, the FBI had established CVE points of contact at twenty-six field offices, created a CVE coordinator at the Department of Homeland Security, and held trainings and resiliency exercises in seven cities.77 During the Trump administration, according to a report by the Brennan Center for Justice, the amount of CVE funding going to law enforcement tripled, from $764,000 to $2,340,000.78 The TSA was created just two months after 9/11 for the explicit purpose of preventing terrorist attacks. Its 2024 fiscal year budget request includes $11.2 billion, over sixty-one thousand positions, and over fifty-seven thousand full-time equivalents.79 Whether profit is derived from supplying the Afghan war or from the expansion of the domestic security state, treating Muslim boyhood as a category of risk is profitable: the more thoroughly Muslim boys can be construed as proto-terrorists, the more money can be made by those who then get paid to watch, detect, and contain them. Without these antagonistic and frightening figures, the American empire might lose its coherence.
Returning to Rezwan’s case, we can observe that the function of the proto-terrorist in the context of a capital-driven war footing also explains why instead of seeing Afghan refugees and white rural low-income people aligning against a war-profiteering elite (that sends low-income white people from rural Missouri to serve in the military and displaces Afghans or others whom they fight), we see antagonism between these groups. Some students at Rezwan’s school made it very clear that he was not welcome; their perceptions of him were almost inevitably shaped by the same stereotypes and “threat” messaging that made Ahmed’s teacher see a bomb when he brought a clock or made security guards at Dulles airport detain a five-year-old. Blame for war is displaced from state actors and capitalists onto ordinary people. Rezwan found himself on the wrong side of resentments that may be racialized in their expression, but that are arguably driven directly or indirectly by warfare capitalism. Such phobias around Muslims then impede cross-racial solidarity and substantial discussions around capitalist exploitation.80
Notes
1. Kartikay Mehrotra and Matti Gellman, “What Happened to Rezwan,” ProPublica, November 19, 2022, https://www.propublica.org/article/missouri-afghan-refugees-rezwan-kohistani-oronogo.
2. U.S. Census, data from July 2021, https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/webbcitycitymissouri (accessed May 22, 2022).
3. Mehrotra and Gellman, “What Happened to Rezwan.”
4. Shrimp LOL mein (@Sammerstein), Twitter, May 20, 2022, 6:32 p.m. https://twitter.com/Sammerstein/status/1527779198617718787.
5. Shrimp LOL mein (@Sammerstein), Twitter, May 21, 2022, 2:51 p.m. https://twitter.com/Sammerstein/status/1528086022789136386.
6. Email communication, Matti Gellman, August 22, 2023.
7. Mehrotra and Gellman, “What Happened to Rezwan.”
8. Charles Hirschkind and Saba Mahmood, “Feminism, the Taliban, and Politics of Counter-Insurgency,” Anthropological Quarterly 75, no. 2 (2002): 343.
9. While many contractors pulled out with the military, some are still operating; see Lynzy Billing, “The U.S. Is Leaving Afghanistan? Tell That to the Contractors: American Firms Capitalize on the Withdrawal, Moving in with Hundreds of New Jobs,” New York Magazine, May 12, 2021, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/05/u-s-contractors-in-afghanistan-are-hiring-amid-withdrawal.html.
10. William Hartung, “Corporate Power, Profiteering, and the ‘Camo Economy,’” Watson Institute, September 13, 2021, 4.
11. Hartung, 5.
12. William Byrd and Javed Noorani, “Exploitation of Mineral Resources in Afghanistan,” USIP Peace Brief, December 1, 2014.
13. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, Quarterly Report to the U.S. Congress, October 30, 2017; Antony Loewenstein, “Peace in Afghanistan? Maybe—but a Minerals Rush Is Already Underway,” The Nation, January 30, 2019.
14. Quoted in Elias Groll, “Despite Risks, Trump Administration Moves Forward with Afghanistan Mining Plan,” Foreign Policy, August 29, 2017, https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/29/despite-risks-trump-administration-moves-forward-with-afghanistan-mining-plan/. America is only one in a series of actors in a long history of extractive capitalism in Afghanistan; the Soviet Union eyed Afghanistan’s minerals (and ports) in the past and, with America’s own recent exit, China is now ready to step into the role of extractor.
15. Department of Homeland Security, “Operation Allies Welcome,” Government of United States, https://www.dhs.gov/allieswelcome; U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, “Temporary Protected Status Designation: Afghanistan,” Government of United States, https://www.uscis.gov/humanitarian/temporary-protected-status/temporary-protected-status-designated-country-afghanistan; International Rescue Committee, “Two Years On, Afghan Potential in U.S. Communities Hindered by Lack of Pathway to Permanent Status,” press release, August 11, 2023, https://www.rescue.org/press-release/2-years-afghan-potential-us-communities-hindered-lack-pathway-permanent-status; Andorra Bruno, “Permanent Immigration Options for Afghans with Immigration Parole,” Congressional Research Service, 2022, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47165/1.
16. Michael Owens, Tom Clark, and Adam Glynn, “Where Do Police Departments Get Their Military-Style Gear?” The Washington Post, July 20, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/07/20/where-do-police-departments-get-their-military-style-gear-heres-what-we-dont-know/.
17. Goldberg, “Militarizing Race,” 21.
18. Goldberg, 21.
19. Chris Sommerfeldt, “Muslim Boy, 7, Beaten Onboard School Bus in North Carolina because of Donald Trump’s Hateful Rhetoric: Father,” New York Daily News, October 13, 2016, https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/muslim-boy-7-beaten-classmates-trump-father-article-1.2828749; Rachael Revesz, “Seven-Year-Old Muslim Schoolboy Abdul Aziz Speaks about Being Bullied on a School Bus,” Independent, October 16, 2016, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/abdul-aziz-usmani-video-watch-muslim-islamophobic-bully-school-bus-north-carolina-pakistan-a7362041.html.
20. Ben Yakas, “Two Muslim Teens Beaten Outside Brooklyn Mosque, Cops Don’t Think It’s a Hate Crime,” Gothamist, July 5, 2016, https://gothamist.com/news/two-muslim-teens-beaten-outside-brooklyn-mosque-cops-dont-think-its-a-hate-crime; Reuters Staff, “Two Muslim Teens Beaten outside New York Mosque: Rights Group,” Reuters, July 4, 2016, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-new-york-muslims-attack/two-muslim-teens-beaten-outside-new-york-mosque-rights-group-idUSKCN0ZL01K.
21. Pia Rebello Britto, “Who Am I? Ethnic Identity Formation of Arab Muslim Children in Contemporary U.S. Society,” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 47, no. 8 (2008): 854.
22. Sophia Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai, “Monster, Terrorist, Fag,” Social Text 20, no. 3 (2002) 117–48; Farzana Shain, “Dangerous Radicals or Symbols of Crisis and Change,” in Muslim Students, Education, and Neoliberalism, ed. Martin Mac an Ghaill and Chris Haywood (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017): 17–33. Deepa Kumar points out that the word ‘terrorist’ did not always connote Arab or South Asian Muslim men, the association developed over time as U.S. strategic ally Israel intensified its imperial ambitions in Gaza and the West Bank (Deepa Kumar, “Terrorcraft: Empire and the Making of the Racialized Terrorist Threat,” Race & Class 62, no. 2 [2020]: 34).
23. Shenila Khoja-Moolji, “The Making of ‘Humans’ and their Others in/through Human Rights Advocacy,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42, no. 2 (2017): 377–402.
24. Michel Foucault, Abnormal Lectures at the College de France 1974–1975 (London: Verso, 2016).
25. Veena Das, On reading Abnormal (1974–75), Columbia Blogs, November 10, 2015, https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/foucault1313/2015/11/10/foucault-513-veena-das-on-reading-abnormal-1974-75/.
26. Das.
27. As cited in Katharyne Mitchell, “Pre-Black Futures,” Antipode 41, no. 1 (2010): 241.
28. Todd Ramlow, “Bad Boys: Abstracts of Difference and the Politics of Youth ‘Deviance,’” GLQ 9, no. 1–2 (2003): 201.
29. National Security Strategy, May 2010 cited in The White House, Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States, Government of United States, August 2011, 1.
30. The White House, 4.
31. The White House, preface.
32. David Schanzer, Charles Kurzman, Jessica Toliver, and Elizabeth Miller, The Challenge and Promise of Using Community Policing Strategies to Prevent Violent Extremism, Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, 2016.
33. FBI, Preventing Violent Extremism in Schools, Office of Partner Engagement, January 2016, 1.
34. FBI, 7.
35. Puar and Rai, “Monster, Terrorist, Fag,” 122.
36. Charles Ruby cited in Amit Rai, “Of Monsters,” Cultural Studies 18, no. 4 (2004): 545.
37. FBI, Preventing Violent Extremism in Schools, 17.
38. The FBI is not alone in enlisting teachers to monitor Muslim students; the United Kingdom’s Prevent program similarly calls on teachers and administrative staff to monitor students and refer them to the government’s anti-radicalization program (Department for Education, The Prevent Duty, Government of United Kingdom, June 2015, 4).
39. FBI, Preventing Violent Extremism in Schools, 22.
40. FBI, “FBI Launches New Awareness Program for Teens,” February 8, 2016, https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/countering-violent-extremism.
41. Mitchell, “Pre-Black Futures.” On Black boyhood in America see Michael Dumas and Joseph Nelson, “(Re)Imagining Black Boyhood,” Harvard Educational Review 86, no. 1 (2016): 27–47.
42. As cited in American Civil Liberties Union, “Noor Complaint to the Department of Justice Requesting an Investigation Pursuant to Title IV,” October 28, 2016.
43. American Civil Liberties Union.
44. American Civil Liberties Union.
45. Cyrus Ho, Tian Quek, Roger Ho, and Carol Choo, “Terrorism and Mental Illness: A Pragmatic Approach for the Clinician,” BJPsych Advances 25 (2019): 101–9.
46. David Frum, “The Truth,” American Enterprise Institute, October 25, 2002, https://www.aei.org/articles/the-truth/. See Caluya, “Sexual Geopolitics,” on the conflation of sexual frustration and economic deprivation as the explanation for international terrorism (Gilbert Caluya, “Sexual Geopolitics: The ‘Blue Balls’ Theory of Terrorism,” Continuum 27, no. 1 [2013]: 54–66).
47. Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
48. Rai, “Of Monster,” 546.
49. Robinson as cited in Rai, 546.
50. New America, Anti-Muslim Activities in the United States 2012–2018, https://www.newamerica.org/in-depth/anti-muslim-activity/.
51. Department of Homeland Security, “About the Campaign: ‘If You See Something, Say Something®’ Program,” https://www.dhs.gov/see-something-say-something/about-campaign.
52. As cited in Diala Shamas and Nermeen Arastu, Mapping Muslims: NYPD Spying and its Impact on American Muslims (Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility Project, 2013), 45.
53. Roozbeh Shirazi, “Between Hosts and Guests: Conditional Hospitality and Citizenship in an American Suburban School,” Curriculum Inquiry 48, no. 1 (2018): 95–114.
54. We see similar dynamics unfold in the case of Naureen Laghari from Pakistan, a girl who was arrested in relation to a terror attack and later released. It was said that she was tricked by the real (male) terrorists. She was asked by the state to give lectures and appear on television to share her story with other youth to caution them against terrorist recruitment. See Shenila Khoja-Moolji, Sovereign Attachments: Masculinity, Muslimness, and Affective Politics in Pakistan (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021).
55. Shamas and Arastu, Mapping Muslims.
56. Lauren Berlant uses ‘slow death’ in Cruel Optimism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011) to refer “to the physical wearing out of a population in a way that points to its deterioration as a defining condition of its experience and historical existence” (95).
57. Asad Dandia, “I Was a Muslim Teen under NYPD Surveillance. But Now I Have More Hope Than Ever,” ACLU Commentary, March 7, 2017, https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/i-was-muslim-teen-under-nypd-surveillance-now-i-have.
58. Dandia, “I Was a Muslim Teen.”
59. Chinese Exclusion Act (1882).
60. Gregory Smith, “Most White Evangelicals Approve of Trump Travel Prohibition and Express Concerns about Extremism,” Pew Research Center, February 27, 2017, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/02/27/most-white-evangelicals-approve-of-trump-travel-prohibition-and-express-concerns-about-extremism/. For a detailed list of all court challenges see: https://www.aclu.org/other/lawsuits-related-trumps-muslim-ban.
61. Kathryn Watson and Zak Hudak, “Trump Says He’d Bring Back ‘Travel Ban’ That’s ‘Even Bigger than Before,’” CBS News, July 7, 2023, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-bring-back-travel-ban-muslim-countries/.
62. Helga Tawil-Souri, ‘Checkpoint Time,’ Qui parle 26, no. 2 (2017): 383–422.
63. Ariel Handel, “Where, Where to, and When in the Occupied Territories: An Introduction to Geography of Disaster,” in The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, ed. Adi Ophir, Michal Givoni, and Sari Hanafi (New York: Zone Books, 2009), 179–222.
64. Saher Selod, Forever Suspect: Racialized Surveillance of Muslim Americans in the War on Terror (Rutgers, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2018): 50.
65. Twelve-year-old Abdul, a Pakistani American Muslim, had his name placed on a (no-fly) list and consequently had difficulty boarding flights (Selod, Forever Suspect, 63). The watch lists created during the height of 9/11 are still in place twenty years later. See the experience of a Muslim leader from Seattle as documented in Nina Shapiro, “Muslim Imam in Seattle Sues over Mysterious FBI Watchlist,” Seattle Times, August 13, 2023, https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/law-justice/muslim-imam-in-seattle-sues-over-fbi-watchlist-that-never-ends/.
66. Selod, Forever Suspect, 67; Khoja-Moolji, Sovereign Attachments.
67. Compare the comments of my interlocutors to Saleem’s experience in Selod, Forever Suspect, 61.
68. Anwar describes this preference for buses in Selod, Forever Suspect, 62.
69. Nazia Kazi, Islamophobia, Race, and Global Politics (Blue Ridge Summit, Pa.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2021).
70. See archived tweet at Aaron Rupar, “Trump’s Unfounded Tweet Stoking Fears about Muslim ‘Prayer Rugs,’ Explained,” Vox News, January 18, 2019, https://www.vox.com/2019/1/18/18188476/trump-muslim-prayer-rugs-tweet-border.
71. Anna Flagg and Andrew Calderon, “500,000 Kids, 30 Million Hours,” The Marshall Project, October 30, 2020.
72. Office of Inspector General, Management Alert—DHS Needs to Address Dangerous Overcrowding and Prolonged Detention of Children and Adults in the Rio Grande Valley (Redacted), July 2, 2019.
73. A. C. Thompson, “Over 200 Allegations of Abuse of Migrant Children,” Propublica, May 31, 2019, https://www.propublica.org/article/over-200-allegations-of-abuse-of-migrant-children-1-case-of-homeland-security-disciplining-someone; John Shattuck, Sushma Raman, and Mathias Risse, Holding Together: The Hijacking of Rights in America and How to Reclaim Them for Everyone (New York: The New Press, 2022).
74. Hamed Aleaziz, “Asylum Seekers from Muslim-Majority Countries,” LA Times, August 31, 2023, https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2023-08-31/texas-prosecutions-muslim-asylum-seekers-1459.
75. Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2017).
76. Casey, “The Racialization of American Muslim Converts.”
77. This information is summarized in a letter written by Texas Congressman Michael McCaul in his capacity as Chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security. See Representative Michael McCaul letter, December 17, 2014, https://mccaul.house.gov/.
78. Faiza Patel, Andrew Lindsay, and Sophia DenUyl, “Countering Violent Extremism in the Trump Era,” Brennan Center for Justice, June 15, 2018, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/countering-violent-extremism-trump-era.
79. Department of Homeland Security, TSA Budget Overview, Fiscal Year 2024 (Government of United States, 2023).
80. Berlant and Warner make this observation about immigrants in Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, Sex in Public (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 549.