“1. Muslim Boyhood in America” in “The Impossibility of Muslim Boyhood”
1. Muslim Boyhood in America
In January 2017, soon after Donald Trump’s administration announced that visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries would be denied entry into the United States, a five-year-old Muslim boy was handcuffed at Washington’s Dulles airport. Airport security officers deemed the boy, whose name was not released, a “threat to America” and held him in custody for five hours.1 Commenting on the incident, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said, “To assume that just because of someone’s age and gender that they don’t pose a threat would be misguided and wrong.”2 Just two years earlier, police had arrested fourteen-year-old Ahmed Mohamed at his school in Irving, Texas, for bringing a homemade digital clock to class. His English teacher thought it looked like a bomb. Law enforcement officers were called, and in a response that foreshadowed the later security overreach at the airport, Ahmed was handcuffed and taken to a juvenile detention center.
In both cases, the state response was disproportionate—disproportionate not only in its imaginative leap from actual to perceived threat, but also in the treatment these boys received when compared to what would have been meted out to similarly aged and similarly situated white boys. Ahmed’s arrest at his school in Texas was the culmination of an organized school response, detailed in subsequent court filings:3 the teacher confiscated the clock device, which was held in the school’s administrative offices for several hours; the principal and a City of Irving police officer removed Ahmed from the classroom and escorted him to another room, where he was confronted by four or five more police officers and the school’s counselor; the police questioned Ahmed for almost an hour and a half, and his pleas to call his parents were ignored. Even as Ahmed maintained that his device was a clock and not a bomb, the police officers handcuffed and arrested him; they transported him to the juvenile detention center where they took mugshots and fingerprints. This was an excessive response. Similarly, in the incident at Dulles airport, arresting a five-year-old boy, and then detaining him away from his mother, seems out of proportion, particularly when the only “triggering event” was the boy’s racial and religious identity. Airport security articulated the boy as threatening in the absence of any action, or even the capacity for any action, that could rationally constitute a threat.
Examining instances of “mugging” by Black youth in Britain and the disproportionate public and state response to minor incidents of street harassment, Stuart Hall and his co-writers suggest in Policing the Crisis that “when such discrepancies appear between threat and reaction . . . we have good evidence to suggest we are in the presence of an ideological displacement.”4 Writing in the context of moral panic, Hall thus mobilized the Freudian psychoanalytic notion of displacement, where a general unease about changing social roles or nebulous anxieties was being displaced onto Black youth. If we apply Hall’s insight to present-day encounters between Muslim boys and the U.S. security apparatus, encounters like those I have described above, we might well ask: What ideological displacement are we witnessing? In the instances above, I would argue that it is the trauma of past terrorist attacks and anxiety surrounding imagined future attacks that is being displaced onto Muslim boys. The executive order that conjures the five-year-old boy as a “threat” asks that security officers at Dulles take multiple imaginative leaps: recall past terrorist attacks with Muslim perpetrators, visualize a future attack, and conceive of the little boy as a perpetrator in the present as well as in the future. However, since the five-year-old boy did not represent a tangible threat—and lacked capacity to do actual harm in an airport full of armed adults—we can understand these imaginative leaps, and the consequent invention of threat, as part of a broader ideological project that seeks to make future crime visible today, so it can be managed and eradicated through a sprawling carceral state. Anxieties about Muslim boys, then, relate only in the most limited of ways to actual Muslim boys and far more closely to the conceptual space of Muslim boyhood as a bridge between past terrorist events and events that might transpire in the future. In the process, though, Muslim boys are transformed into proto-terrorists or terrorists-in-the-making.
The construction of Muslim boys as proto-terrorists can be properly understood as a practice of racialization: it introduces impurity (threat) in the subject by disavowing the imputed purity (innocence) often associated with childhood. Here I draw on both Miriam Ticktin, who argues that political imaginations of innocence are shaped by a search for a “space of purity,”5 and Deleuze and Guattari, who see race as another name for impurity conferred by a system of domination.6 While prior scholarly work on the racialization of Muslims has focused on adults, here we can extend that investigation by redirecting our attention to the experience of boyhood: the racialization of younger Muslims both draws on, and departs from, the racialization of adults. If boyhood is construed broadly as a developmental stage in the lifespan of a human, then Muslim boyhood is constructed as a developmental stage in the lifespan of a terrorist. And that perception is what distinguishes this category (and its racialization) from the racialization of Muslim adults generally in U.S. cultural framings.
Framing Muslim boys as proto-terrorists is politically useful in animating and sustaining a vigilant and vigilante stance toward a prospective war or terrorist attack. And since wars require preparation—weapons research and manufacturing, an ever-expanding militarily directed workforce, and surveillance—the threat implied in Muslim boyhood becomes an excuse for bloated expenditure on domestic and international security regimes. It justifies the expansion and privatization of security services, collaboration between military and police, investment in new technologies for surveillance, and the construction of new prisons and detention sites. A closer study of Muslim boyhood in public culture, then, not only reveals the routes and sites of racialization supplemental to those that are usually traced in scholarly inquiries, it also reminds us—as Cedric Robinson noted—that racialization is ultimately about the naturalization of capitalistic inequalities.7 Accordingly, throughout the book, I suggest that the formulation of Muslim boyhood as a threat is tied to capitalist expansion and accumulation.
Carcerality in the United States, of course, has strong ties to anti-Blackness. As suggested by Michelle Alexander (among others), prisons are anti-Black institutions; they are designed that way.8 But when we pay attention to Muslim boys, we come to understand how the War on Terror has inaugurated many changes to the U.S. carceral ecology, expanding the logics, sites, and forms of containment for a population defined on racial and national, as well as religious, terms. Agencies such as the Transportation Security Administration and programs like the FBI’s Countering Violent Extremism were inaugurated after 9/11 to contain a threat explicitly defined as Muslim. We can see an expansion of the carceral ecology in detention rooms at airports and in temporary holding facilities at U.S. national borders; in the surveillance of Muslim Student Associations; in the recycling of combat equipment from military to local police forces (on full display in Ferguson, Miss., in August 2014 and in other U.S. cities since); in the Department of Homeland Security’s Urban Areas Strategy Initiative and the Defense Department’s 1122 Program, which allow police departments and sheriff’s offices to purchase (through grant monies or their own funds) equipment at discounted federal prices. While not all of these changes have been exclusively targeted at Muslims, and Muslims are not the only individuals to be affected by them, the everyday surveillance of Muslims is an intended and significant outcome of this expansion. This surveillance can be understood as a portable form of enclosure: an additional dimension to the experience of carcerality in which the penitentiary has become mobile.
Relatedly, there is room to question whether the incidents above are provoked by race or religion. However, under my rubric of race (or racialization), such single-axis explanations of oppression are beside the point. The production of threat is not uniform; and different forms of threat (suicide bombing, hypersexuality, homicide, riots) are attached to different bodies, codifying them differently in the process. We therefore notice subtle variations in the experiences of Black as compared to Brown or white or white-passing Muslim boys; immigrants as compared to American-born Muslims; working-class Muslims as compared to those who are captains of industry. As we will see in the case of the “Boston Marathon bomber” in chapter 3, white-passing can mitigate anti-Muslim sentiment; Brownness might amplify it. It is, therefore, more helpful to think of these regimes of difference (religion, race, caste, class, or ethnicity) as connective, with those connections in turn adding to their intensity and force. Thus, when I narrate episodes of violence, I resist the temptation to outline which specific regime of difference is in play. Race, Islam, and ethnicity are more helpfully viewed as assemblages, and I consider how various regimes of difference solidify, mix, and overlap, in specific spatiotemporal contexts, to demarcate otherness.9 It is by focusing on connected histories and associations within apparently distinct regimes of difference that we are able to better understand how racialization proceeds.
And Muslims have always been part of this story of race in America. If, as Renisa Mawani argues, race is a “modern regime that instituted an entire range of differences (historical, corporeal, cultural, climatic, and moral) between Europeans [and] non-Europeans,”10 then Shaista Patel has also shown that European encounters with African and Arab Muslims (pejoratively called Moors) on the Iberian Peninsula were constitutive in this project of instituting difference. The eight centuries of Muslim and African presence in Europe became the lens through which Europeans, beginning in the fifteenth century, viewed the people they invaded in the “New World.”11 Since Europe had long defined its identity and its purity against a Moorish foil, European views of indigenous people, and later of enslaved people and migrants, would be informed by prevailing discourses of Muslim otherness. In fact, as David Theo Goldberg has observed, “Race of necessity is knotted from the outset of its formulation and social fashioning with religious resonance. Jews, Muslims, and black and New World Indian ‘heathens’ represent Europe’s formative nonbelonging.”12 Distancing between the dominant group and others ultimately pushes the non-belonging person or group into the experience of racism.
I do not, however, intend in this book to offer an essentialized description of Muslim boyhood—indeed, there is no single essential experience. Instead, I view Muslim boyhood as a heuristic device,13 one that highlights for us how constructions of threat are integral to the story of American racial capitalism. The figure of the proto-terrorist—created and reproduced through ordinary practices of surveillance at schools and at airports, as I show in chapter 2—is a capitalist necessity, used to harness public alertness in relation to a prefigured future-attack and to keep America in a permanent state of war. But racial capitalism takes other routes as well. In chapter 3, I discuss the instrumental staging of Muslim boys by state and media elites, which allows them a tentative entry into the domain of innocence so others can profit from them. When Ahmed Mohamed is invited to the White House or on a tour of the New York City Hall, politicians see an opportunity to represent themselves as antiracists and buy public goodwill, in a practice I term commodity antiracism. Such ostensibly positive portrayals of Muslim boys work through exception and preserve the collective notion of Muslim boyhood as a condition of threat and impurity.
As the brief digression above into European history reminds us, an American construction of Muslim boyhood partakes in a long history and exists in parallel to iterations of Muslim boyhood as they have developed in other global settings. If Muslim boyhood is, in the U.S., a heuristic device against which the center—defined as pure, innocent, or non-raced—becomes manifest, then we might ask what this device reveals in other societies where Muslims are minoritized or politically and socially marginalized. I conclude by briefly considering India as that other context: a site where we see emerge a similar focus on Islam and boyhood as threatening or contaminating elements. The place that whiteness fills as a salient racializing force in the U.S. is, in the case of India, occupied by the Hindutva ideology. We can see parallels between the American construction of the proto-terrorist and Hindu fears of the “love jihadi.” While the specific manifestations of Muslim boyhood may vary in different global settings, it is worth noting the recurring negative cultural attention directed toward Muslim boys, in particular, and the determination to distance them from the state of innocence that more often attaches to childhood. By conceptualizing Muslim boyhood as a heuristic, we can begin to see linkages across political contexts, even as Muslim boyhood is networked with different locally specific ideologies.
Race and Religion as a Connective Regime
Racism in America, as Michael Omi and Howard Winant have explained, has a strong visual dimension, which entails ascribing “social and symbolic meaning to perceived phenotypical differences.”14 In recent times, racism has extended to incorporate cultural traits. Amaney Jamal argues that today’s racialization of Arabs and Muslims perceives a “clash of values . . . This process of ‘othering’ is based on assumptions about culture and religion instead of phenotype.”15 In these newly cultural practices of racialization, Saher Selod observes that the usual markers of racial difference, such as skin color, have been replaced by cultural markers—the hijab, a beard, or a Muslim-sounding name.16 When the practice of othering is expanded from phenotypes to encompass culture, Islam (a religion that, like other religions, is lived in part through sartorial choices and visible, everyday behaviors) is racialized as a result.17 And racialization here has spatial dimensions, defining Islam in terms of its perceived distance from white liberal humanism. Deleuze and Guattari explain:
Racism operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face, which endeavors to integrate nonconforming traits into increasingly eccentric and backward waves, sometimes tolerating them at given places under given conditions, in a given ghetto, sometimes erasing them from the wall, which never abides alterity (it’s a Jew, it’s an Arab, it’s a Negro, it’s a lunatic . . .). From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside. There are only people who should be like us and whose crime it is not to be.18
In “should be like us” and the crime of “not to be,” we see a center defined in terms of purity, with deviation expressed as distance from that pure center. To the extent that Islam is distanced from whiteness (Deleuze and Guattari’s “White-Man face”), its practitioners are moved from “non-raced” to “raced.” The categories of “Islam” and “race” are thus conceptually linked to each other in a place progressively marked by impurity (“eccentric and backward waves”). As Deleuze and Guattari argue, “The race-tribe exists only at the level of an oppressed race, and in the name of the oppression it suffers: there is no race but inferior, minoritarian; there is no dominant race; a race is defined not by its purity but rather by the impurity conferred upon it by a system of domination.”19 In the context of Muslim boyhood, then, this leads us to ask the question that naturally emerges from this definition of race: How is this impurity conferred and maintained? Considering rhetorical strategies around purity/impurity—which, as we have seen above, are often discussed through notions of innocence and threat—may reveal the way this distribution is effected and policed.
We see these dynamics in the casting of Muslim men as “a mutilated deviation from proper [read White] manhood,” as Gargi Bhattacharyya has suggested.20 Mariam Durrani’s close reading of the conservative American website Breitbart News shows that Muslim men appear on the website primarily as sexual predators and as un/sub-human, often labeled as Neanderthals, pigs, or vermin.21 In Breitbart’s heavily fictionalized narrative, Durrani sees Muslim men portrayed as engaging in violence not only against non-Muslims (associations with terrorist attacks) but also against their own daughters (accusations of rape). Breitbart’s discourse is an extreme expression of assumptions that exist more broadly in U.S. society, where Muslim men are often presented as fully formed terrorists and predators. But when a five-year-old Iranian-American Muslim boy is arrested at an airport, it is not about any actual acts of violence; it is the potentiality that he represents. Scrutiny of this potentially violent group might even exceed that of the scrutiny directed at adults. In a focus group formed for this project (which will feature in chapter 2), a teenaged boy put it this way: “This age range that we are in, like I am guessing he [Ahmed Mohamed] is around our age too? People assume that we are more reckless since we are not completely mature yet, until we reach a certain age. So, they think we would be more capable of doing these things than, say, a forty-year-old.” Capability and potentiality orient us toward the future. In the imaginary of the security regime (of which the security officers at Dulles are an instantiation), Muslim boys are presumed perpetrators of future terrorist attacks: they are imagined as proto-terrorists. And since they might turn violent at any moment, logic dictates that they must be quarantined or at least regarded with suspicion. The detection and enclosure of the proto-terrorist will be the topic of the next chapter.
But not all Muslims are imputed with impurity (or distanced from the center) similarly. If we follow Deleuze and Guattari in recognizing that racism establishes degrees of deviance, with some bodies coded as more distant from the center than others, then we must recognize that Black, Brown, white, and white-passing Muslims experience the process of racialization differently. In addition, this experience of racialization can change as the context or conditions change. In some instances, Muslimness can overwhelm whiteness: Patrick Casey studied white converts to Islam who experienced prejudice only when they donned Muslim religious markers, such as hijab for women or kufi for men.22 Similarly, given the close visual association of race and religion, and the use of cultural markers in the process of racialization, those who “look like” Muslims, such as Sikhs, may also be subject to hate crimes. The first anti-Muslim hate crime in the aftermath of 9/11 was committed against a Sikh man in Arizona. The victim was working at his gas station when a forty-two-year-old white man drove up and shot him five times before fleeing the scene. When we consider race and Islam as belonging to a connective regime (and include other axes of difference such as gender, age, or nationality), we can observe the uneven assignment of impurity/threat that is subject to change under given conditions. We can thus account for variation in individual experiences of racialization without relinquishing the notion that there exists a shared minoritarian sense. Here, I am informed by José Muñoz’s use of “feeling” and “sense,” where the former is linked to an individual experience and the latter in relation to experiencing that feeling as part of a commons.23
The Promise and Perils of Innocence
In a broader U.S. cultural context, where childhood is typically equated with innocence, how do we understand incidents like the ones discussed at the beginning of this chapter? How is it that five- and fourteen-year-old Muslim boys are arrested for actions that would normally be overlooked or even praised, or detained for simply existing?
Modern societies insist on certain ideas about childhood. Prominent among these is the link between childhood and innocence. The Oxford English Dictionary accordingly defines children as “free from moral wrong, sin, or guilt”; to be a child is to be “pure, unpolluted.” But until recently childhood was not associated with purity. Robin Bernstein notes that in the U.S. historical context, the doctrine of childhood innocence emerged only in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.24 Children, including white children, were previously seen as inherently sinful and sexual—born with original sin and thus not innocent—as well as lacking the rationality and self-control that would come to them as adults. Nineteenth-century thinkers reimagined children as innocent—without sin, without sexual feelings, oblivious to worldly affairs, and potentially able to redeem adults. Children were, Bernstein argues, “understood not as innocent but as innocence itself; not as a symbol of innocence but as its embodiment.”25 In the contemporary American context, images of childhood innocence are often deployed to invoke pure, unpolluted spacetimes—nostalgia about a pristine past or longing for a peaceful future. Ticktin accordingly notes that political imaginations of innocence are shaped by a search for a “space of purity.”26
To ensure that childhood remains a politically useful space for recalling the past and imagining the future, “child fundamentalism” holds that children must remain unsullied by politics, sin, corruption, and sexual knowledge.27 In other words, children must remain pure and protecting childhood innocence by ensuring that they are not exposed to certain knowledge and experiences thus becomes a societal imperative. Ticktin locates this formulation of innocence in the Judeo-Christian tradition of Adam and Eve, a story where innocence is linked to lack of worldly knowledge; Adam and Eve’s fall from the garden of Eden follows from Eve’s decision to eat from the tree of knowledge.28 Innocence is thus defined by deficit and lack: of knowledge, agency, and experience. But this deficit-state does not lead to entry into the “space of purity” for everyone as differently racialized populations are situated differently in relation to this space.
The reimagined nineteenth-century childhood was racially coded as white and was constituted in opposition to Blackness: the Black child was marked as non-innocent and as a laboring body subject to discipline. Significantly, even where innocence was imputed to Black people, it did not automatically lead to freedom, or to forgiveness, as it would for white children. Defenders of chattel slavery, as Erica Meiners has observed, equated Black adults with children narrowly in terms of their ability to reason, and did so to legitimize disciplining enslaved adults.29 Abolitionists, for their part, invoked adult Blacks’ supposed childlike status to argue for their better treatment: if not capable of adult reason, they should be punished less harshly.30 Innocence (mobilized as a deficit state) thus has had paradoxical consequences for Black people: it has been used to advance both violent regulation and care, to justify discipline and control of child and adult populations. More recently, presumed childish irrationality has been deployed both to advance the carceral state (building prisons to discipline unreason) and to advocate for abolishing the prison system (rehabilitation instead of punishment).31
In the twenty-first-century Western context, nonwhite boys are typically assumed to be more precocious and sexually experienced, an assumption that prevents their association with innocence and, relatedly, prevents their entry into the space of purity. This Western tendency to project greater maturity onto nonwhite boys was apparent during the recent refugee crisis in Europe. In 2015, when the body of a three-year-old Syrian boy—Aylan Kurdi, who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea—washed up on a beach in Turkey, it sparked widespread public concern for refugees in Europe. Public sentiment in the United Kingdom and the European Union strengthened in support of welcoming more refugees, especially children. The following year, after a campaign led by Labour politician Alfred Dubs, new legislation was introduced in Britain to permit entry for unaccompanied refugee children. While the proposal asked for the admission of 3,000 children, permission was given only for 350 (a number later increased to 480). Nevertheless, as Carly McLaughlin notes, when nonwhite youth actually arrived under the proposed law’s provisions for children and youth up to age eighteen, the welcoming sentiments quickly transformed into scrutiny and suspicion.32 These young boys arriving from the Middle East departed from the model of the lonely child; they were burly and tall; some had facial hair and wore hoodies. They were therefore read as “unchildlike children” and “foreign delinquents.”33 It was insinuated that adults had forged their documents to gain entry as youth. Because they did not fit an unstated model of visible childlike innocence, some incoming youth—many Muslim boys among them—were not deemed worthy of protection.
Just a few years later, for Ukrainian refugees—coded as white (albeit precariously)—fleeing to the United Kingdom following Russia’s February 2022 invasion, childlike innocence expanded to incorporate adults as well. Media coverage of Ukrainian refugees often featured girls and women, emphasizing notions of vulnerability and lack of facility in the English language, which made them worthy of care. A feature article on BBC News, for example, portrays white women and girls photographed against natural terrains of tranquil streams, grassy meadows, and fluffy sheep.34 Media commentators explicitly compared Ukrainian refugees with those from the Middle East: a senior foreign correspondent at CBS News said, Kyiv “isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European—I have to choose those words carefully, too—city, one where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that it’s going to happen.”35 A former British politician writing for the Telegraph remarked: “They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. Ukraine is a European country. Its people watch Netflix and have Instagram accounts, vote in free elections, and read uncensored newspapers.”36 And, on BBC News, a former deputy prosecutor of Ukraine said: “It’s very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blonde hair being killed.”37
For Ukrainian refugees, the U.K. Home Office simplified visa forms, fully digitized the visa process, removed certain routine eligibility criteria related to language requirements and salary thresholds, and boosted staff numbers so applications could be processed quickly. Sponsorship schemes such as “Homes for Ukraine” and the “Ukraine Family Scheme” were created to encourage individuals and businesses to take in, host, house, and provide homes for refugees. According to Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, Ukrainian refugees had “the right to work and to access benefits and public services, including education and healthcare, on the same footing as U.K. nationals.”38 By the end of June 2023, more than 179,500 people from Ukraine had arrived in the United Kingdom.39 Such is the reception of whiteness: it is welcomed, accommodated, facilitated, and supported. This is not, of course, to deny that Ukrainians are precariously situated within whiteness. Daria Krivonos has observed that before the full-scale Russian onslaught, Ukrainians who migrated to Poland for work did not experience the same protections as their European counterparts; they were “denied access to complete or ‘hegemonic’ whiteness.”40 And yet, without negating the variegated experience of people coded as white, we can notice shared white privilege; we can further see how racialized Muslims (and Muslim nations) serve as a foil for Ukrainian innocence, whiteness, and civilization. Krivonos herself notes that preference and favorable treatment of Ukrainians should be situated in a context of widespread anti-Muslim and anti-Black racism.
In the United States, the politics of innocence often plays out in a judicial or carceral context; we may see reduced cultural attention to childlike purity or innocence in the abstract but a heightened awareness of how ascribed maturity (or lack thereof) relates to innocence of—or responsibility for—one’s actions. White children and adults alike are afforded a lack of culpability that is usually associated with innocence. Analyzing reports from the trial of U.S. army personnel who engaged in sexual violence at Abu Ghraib, Kelly Oliver wonders why soldiers who perpetrated acts of torture were dismissed as teenagers “just having fun.”41 She suggests their horrible acts were normalized as childish fun because imputing childhood innocence to the perpetrators served as an “inoculant against responsibility and guilt.”42 This inoculant effect was especially visible when Abu Ghraib defendants claimed not to know that forcing Muslim prisoners to eat pork violated their religious beliefs: they tried to enter the domain of innocence by way of ignorance.
While Oliver writes specifically about torture at Abu Ghraib, white innocence is similarly imputed in many of the incidents involving Muslim boys that I describe in this book. A particularly disturbing example of this innocence-ignorance nexus comes to us from Lynnwood, Washington. On November 6, 2021, a thirteen-year-old Muslim boy was brutally beaten and dragged from place to place on the streets of Lynnwood by two teens (fifteen and thirteen years old), who also hurled insults about his mother, calling her a “Muslim terrorist.”43 During the hour-long assault, one of the attackers asked the boy to “kiss his shoes and perform the act of prostration [as done during the Muslim prayer].” The act of prostration in an Islamic religious context is an expression of ultimate submission to the Divine. In asking the boy to perform prostration, the perpetrators both mocked Islam and demanded submission: a demand that lays claim to power and simultaneously establishes a symbolic boundary between the one who submits and the one submitted to. The intentionality of this act seems evident, but was it obvious to the society that was responsible for punishing these offenders? We often see that these intentions are obscured in the aftermath of such acts. In claiming innocence (or engaging in willful ignorance), the perpetrators of torture or bullying, or those who quarantined the five-year-old boy at the airport, shield themselves from accountability. When army guards “don’t know” that pork is offensive to Muslim sensibilities; when the teacher “doesn’t realize” the device is a homemade clock; when the teens who force the Muslim boy to prostrate are “just playing around,” we can see the innocence-ignorance nexus at work.
But there is also a second, more broadly culturally damning reality: that the white soldiers or bullying teens might not in fact fully understand the meaning of their bullying (though of course they understand it in part), because the U.S. educational system does not pay much attention to teaching about Islam.44 Perpetrators can claim innocence because as a society we do not ensure that ignorance is not an option, that students grow up in a diverse culture knowing basic information about their neighbors.
In tracing the politics of innocence, I do not intend to claim (or reclaim) innocence for Muslim boys. The quest for innocence inevitably leads to redemptive or respectability politics and not to transformative justice. This book is not a defense of innocence. I am instead interested in understanding how societies distribute innocence, how they map it onto certain bodies and withhold it from others, and the consequences of those projects of distribution and ascription. When innocence is denied to Muslim boys, they are refused permission to experiment or to make mistakes. Experimentation’s relationship to boyhood as a developmental stage is complex: boyhood evokes an expectation of experimentation and frivolity, but also the anticipation of discipline from adults. The particular construction of Muslim boyhood as a threat means that Muslim boys may well experience the disciplinary aspect of boyhood, but they certainly do not have permission to experiment or to be wrong. This bifurcation of expected boyhood experiences is vividly illustrated in the punitive school and state response when Ahmed brought his clock to school. Muslim boys are a priori assumed to be terrorists, carrying the potential for terror—and this imputed future disqualifies them from partaking in the pleasures and freedoms of boyhood. This denial has further material consequences for them in the form of everyday bullying and surveillance. Muslim boys then grow up learning to make themselves small and invisible to evade the white disciplinary gaze.
Archives of Muslim Boyhood
While much has been written about the racialization of Muslims in America, scholars have only recently begun to pay greater attention to its gendered dimensions.45 Incorporating gender into our analysis helps us to see not only how women, men, and non-binary people are racialized differently but also how anti-Muslim practices interact with other regimes of difference, including sexuality, ability, national origin, and social class. The emerging work on gender and racialization has, however, focused on adult Muslims, particularly women. There is good reason for this: the trope of the “oppressed Muslim woman” has often been mobilized as an excuse for colonial and imperial invasions of Muslim-majority regions. Studies about Muslim youth, on the other hand, have tended to center on their lived experiences as religious minorities in the West, including struggles with belonging and identity, and experiences of bullying.46 While questions of experience and political figuration are interlinked, this book focuses on the latter as it can help us recognize the gamut of subjective experiences available for those who identify as Muslim boys. And, as it turns out, the available subject positions are not particularly hospitable.
Considering Muslim boyhood in the United States means examining the discursive practices through which the figure of the Muslim boy appears in our world: the speech acts, institutional policies, behaviors, and norms that bring this subject into effect and the historical conditions that make it possible. Specifically, I study how Muslim boyhood takes shape in particular spaces (in schools, at borders, and in mass media) and within specific relations (encounters with the police or FBI, interactions with teachers and white peers). No single location or relation is determining, but we can detect a pattern across these sites and networks as U.S. public culture is formed and expressed. Episodes of arrests, bullying, killing, and surveillance of Muslim boys are my objects of analysis. Events investigated include the following: the 2015 arrest of fourteen-year-old Ahmed Mohamed at his school in Irving, Texas; the 2016 beating of a sixteen-year-old on the streets outside a Muslim community center in Brooklyn; the 2016 alleged abuse and assault of an eleven-year-old (publicly identified only as A.A.) by his teacher Faye Myles in Phoenix; the 2016 beating of seven-year-old Abdul Aziz on a school bus in North Carolina; the 2017 arrest of a five-year-old at Washington’s Dulles airport; the 2021 beating of a thirteen-year-old Muslim boy on the streets of Lynnwood, Washington; and the 2022 death of fourteen-year-old Afghan refugee Rezwan Kohistani in Missouri. Throughout the book I identify the boys by their first name; this is partly to humanize them and also a way of recognizing how very young they are. I extend my analysis via a close study of FBI policies developed with the specific goal of intervening in school settings where extremist recruitment is anticipated—the FBI’s Preventing Violent Extremism in Schools program. In this program’s educator-facing materials, we can see the precise mechanisms that turn a cautionary discourse on extremism toward the construction of Muslim boyhood as a threat.
While I will have a lot to say about violence against Muslim boys, I will disrupt that by talking about those rare moments when they are staged as innocent or given celebrity status. These are episodes that escape the ubiquitous enfolding of Muslim boys into stereotypes associated with Muslim men. In one such instance, Ahmed Mohamed is first arrested for his homemade alarm clock, but then is invited to visit the White House and Facebook headquarters. Such staging, which seems contradictory and at least initially a deviation from the pattern we see so often, I argue, ultimately fails to challenge the original frames. It works through exception, which entails abstracting Muslim boys (segregating and elevating the one from all), whereas the negative portrayals of Muslims that we will encounter work through aggregation (subsuming the one within all). Instrumental staging of Muslim boys like Ahmed enables politicians and corporations to buy goodwill by articulating themselves as antiracists, in a practice I name: commodity antiracism. In another case, a white-passing Muslim youth, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, kills three people and injures hundreds at the 2013 Boston Marathon and ends up featured on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. Here we see another example of instrumental staging where a corporation breaks away from sedimented frames of Muslim boyhood in the service of profit/revenue. In these cases, we see how terrorism is commercialized and antiracism commodified.
Although this book is a cultural critique and I remain focused on public culture, my thinking is also informed by five focus group interviews with twenty-six non-white Muslim high school boys, conducted in the aftermath of the 2017 Dulles airport arrest. The interviews took place in Queens, New York, between April and June of 2017, during an afterschool program for high school boys run by a local nonprofit youth development organization. I co-conducted the interviews with a staff member (a Muslim man of Pakistani heritage) who had been working with the participants since 2015. Participants were mostly recent immigrants from Bangladesh, Nepal, and Pakistan, or second-generation Americans whose parents had migrated from these countries. They were mostly Brown and Muslim; on one occasion a couple of non-Muslim boys of color participated in the discussions as well.47 Study participants did not want to be identified by their names, so I use pseudonyms for them. The arrest of the five-year-old boy at Dulles airport earlier that year and Ahmed Mohamed’s arrest just two years prior were the primary topics of our discussion. I wanted to see how these boys reacted to the cases: Could these same overreactions have happened to them? Could the same have happened to a girl? These conversations led us to more intimate exchanges about how my interlocutors navigated everyday life: participants compared the relative safety of their predominantly Brown schools and neighborhoods with experiences they had in Manhattan or other “white neighborhoods,” where “as the only Brown person, the cop is just looking at you.” Findings from these focus groups contextualize the isolated encounters featured elsewhere in the book. They show us how Muslim boys encounter and negotiate the political formation of Muslim boyhood at the heart of this book through minor gestures (“avoiding eye contact,” “taking a different street,” “staying mellow,” “not draw[ing] attention to yourself”). We can see in these moments how oppressive constructions are experienced in everyday life as burdens and burdening, crushing the bodies of Muslim boys into an ever-smaller space.
Following Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, and Simone Brown, I direct attention toward the circulation of Muslim boyhood in public culture (where it becomes a signifier for threat), the fact of Muslim boyhood (where young Muslim life is an objective fact), and the varied experience of Muslim boyhood (where different regimes of impurity intersect to shape this experience).48 Even as I try to parse these out in the chapters below for analytical clarity, their entanglement is patently clear. I close with a reflection on what the heuristic of Muslim boyhood reveals when analyzed in a different global context, that of India under the current Hindu supremacist ideology. We see at work similar anxieties about purity and assumptions of innocence/threat, not in relation to whiteness but in relation to ethno-religious absolutism. These anxieties are nonetheless given shape and force through a discourse about, and surveillance of, Muslim boys.
This book began as an investigation about the politics of innocence in relation to Muslim boys, but I end up telling a much broader story of how Muslim boyhood in the American context ties together white supremacy, carceral ecologies, and capitalist accumulation. I tell this story out of a concern for the people who can get caught in this violent matrix. And by viewing Muslim boyhood as a heuristic, we can analyze its manifestation in other contexts as well, revealing both continuities and differences. Reading about violence against Muslims boys in the media and court documents, or in communications from my interlocutors; watching videos of beatings and harassment; following hashtag campaigns where individuals reveal their experiences of abuse and intimidation; paying attention to the perpetrators’ side: these are all difficult experiences. But attention to the specifics—words, feelings, photographs, and so on—is important because, as Ghassem-Fachandi observes, it is precisely through the practices of naming, labeling, staging, and describing that some spaces, bodies, and objects are purified, and others are cast as impure.49 And that which gets cast as impure—through assertions of threat, underdevelopment, criminality, excess emotion, or backwardness—as history has shown, gets colonized, expropriated, and even eradicated.
Notes
1. Georgia Diebelius, “Boy, 5, Handcuffed at US Border for Being ‘Security Threat’ to USA,” Metro, January 31, 2017, http://metro.co.uk/2017/01/31/boy-5-handcuffed-at-us-border-for-being-security-threat-to-usa-6417601/.
2. Diebelius.
3. “Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed vs. Irving Independent School District Civil Action No. 3,” United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas Dallas Division, May 18, 2017.
4. Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1978), 29.
5. Miriam Ticktin, “A World without Innocence,” America Ethnologist 44, no. 4 (2017): 577.
6. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 379.
7. Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). On racial capitalism see Robin Kelley, “What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism?” Boston Review, January 12, 2017.
8. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (New York: The New Press, 2012); see also Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015).
9. On racializing assemblages see Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014).
10. Renisa Mawani, “Specters of Indigeneity in British-Indian Migration, 1914,” Law & Society Review 46, no. 2 (2012): 373.
11. Shaista Patel, “The ‘Indian Queen’ of the Four Continents: Tracing the ‘Undifferentiated Indian’ through Europe’s Encounters with Muslims, Anti-Blackness, and Conquest of the ‘New World,’” Cultural Studies 33, no. 3 (2019): 417.
12. David Theo Goldberg, “Militarizing Race,” Social Text 34, no. 4 (2016): 19.
13. I follow the lead of Alys Weinbaum et al. as they use the heuristic device of the ‘modern girl’ to investigate geographically and politically specific manifestations of the modern girl while nonetheless observing connections and similarities that extend across different iterations. See Alys Weinbaum, Lynn Thomas, Priti Ramamurthy, Uta Poiger, Madeleine Yue Dong, and Tani Barlow, The Modern Girl around the World (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008).
14. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 1994), 111.
15. Amaney Jamal, “Civil Liberties and the Otherization of Arab and Muslim Americans,” in Race and Arab Americans before and after 9/11, ed. Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 119.
16. Saher Selod, “Citizenship Denied: The Racialization of Muslim American Men and Women Post-9/11,” Critical Sociology 41, no. 1 (2015): 77–95.
17. See Saher Selod and David Embrick, “Racialization and Muslims: Situating the Muslim Experience in Race Scholarship,” Sociology Compass 7, no. 8 (2013): 644–55; Tariq Modood, Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity, and Muslims in Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Andrew Shyrock, “The Moral Analogies of Race,” in Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11, ed. Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 81–113.
18. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 178.
19. Deleuze and Guattari, 379.
20. Gargi Bhattacharyya, Dangerous Brown Men (New York: Zed Books, 2008), 89.
21. Mariam Durrani, “The Gendered Muslim Subject,” in The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race, ed. H. Samy Alim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 353.
22. Patrick Casey, “The Racialization of American Muslim Converts by the Presence of Religious Markers,” Ethnicities 21, no. 3 (2021): 521–37.
23. José Esteban Muñoz, The Sense of Brown (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000).
24. Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence (New York: New York University Press, 2011).
25. Bernstein, 4.
26. Ticktin, “A World without Innocence,” 577.
27. The term “child fundamentalism” is used by Barbara Baird to describe this insistence on protecting children from corruption. Barbara Baird, “Child Politics, Feminist Analyses,” Australian Feminist Studies 23, no. 57 (2008): 291–305.
28. Ticktin, “A World without Innocence,” 579.
29. Erica Meiners, For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
30. Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 25.
31. Meiners, For the Children?, 5.
32. Carly McLaughlin, “They Don’t Look Like Children’: Child Asylum-Seekers, the Dubs Amendment, and the Politics of Childhood,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44, no. 11 (2018): 1757–73.
33. McLaughlin, 1 and 7.
34. Martin Dan Martin and Jennifer Harby, “How Ukrainian Refugees Found Their Second Home in the UK,” BBC News, February 23, 2023, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-derbyshire-64676216.
35. Charlie D’Agata cited in Ben Kesslen, “CBS News’ Charlie D’Agata Apologizes for Saying Ukraine More ‘Civilized’ than Iraq, Afghanistan,” New York Post, February 26, 2022, https://nypost.com/2022/02/26/cbs-news-charlie-dagata-apologizes-for-saying-ukraine-more-civilized-than-iraq-afghanistan/.
36. Daniel Hannan, “Vladimir Putin’s Monstrous Invasion Is an Attack on Civilisation Itself,” Telegraph, February 26, 2022, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/02/26/vladimir-putins-monstrous-invasion-attack-civilisation/.
37. Arab News, “Interview,” YouTube, March 1, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pU-8gKaUO_Y.
38. Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, “100,000 Ukrainians Welcomed to Safety in the UK,” Government of United Kingdom, July 28, 2022, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/100000-ukrainians-welcomed-to-safety-in-the-uk.
39. United Kingdom Home Office, “Statistics on Ukrainians, Year Ending June 2023,” Government of United Kingdom, https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-system-statistics-year-ending-june-2023/statistics-on-ukrainians-in-the-uk.
40. Daria Krivonos, “Racial Capitalism and the Production of Difference in Helsinki and Warsaw,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 49, no. 6 (2023): 1509.
41. Kelly Oliver, “Innocence, Perversion, and Abu Ghraib,” Philosophy Today 51, no. 3 (2007): 346.
42. Oliver, 347.
43. Jake Goldstein-Street, “Teens Charged with Hate Crime in Islamophobic Attack near Lynnwood,” Herald Net, March 25, 2022, https://www.heraldnet.com/news/teens-charged-with-hate-crime-in-islamophobic-attack-near-lynnwood/.
44. On the teaching of Islam in American schools see Natasha Merchant, “Teaching about Islam in U.S. Schools,” Thresholds 41, no. 2 (2018): 64–67.
45. See as an example Durrani, “The Gendered Subject.” A number of Muslim scholars and activists, most notably Jasmine Zine and Darakshan Raja, have begun to theorize the gendered effects of anti-Muslim violence.
46. Empirical studies include: Louise Archer, “Race, ‘Face,’ and Masculinity,” in Muslims in Britain, ed. Peter Hopkins and Richard Gale (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 74–91; Louise Archer, Race, Masculinity, and Schooling (London: McGraw Hill, 2003); Farzana Shain, The New Folk Devils (Stoke-on-Trent, UK: Trentham Books, 2011); Luke Howie, Amanda Keddie, Lucas Walsh, and Jane Wilkinson, “Wild and Tame Zones in Times of Disharmony,” Australia, Journal of Youth Studies 24, no. 7 (2021): 871–85; Studies on Muslim girls include Farzana Shain, “Navigating the Unequal Education Space in Post-9/11 England,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 53, no. 3 (2021): 270–87; Tehmina Basit, “I Want More Freedom, but Not Too Much: British Muslim Girls and the Dynamism of Family Values,” Gender and Education 9, no. 4 (1997): 425–40; Heidi Mirza and Veena Meetoo, “Empowering Muslim Girls?” British Journal of Sociology of Education 39, no. 2 (2018): 227–41.
47. I was directed to this afterschool program because a cohort of Brown Muslim boys regularly attended it. However, since the program was open to all high school boys at the school, on one occasion a couple of non-Muslim boys of color attended as well. Out of respect, I did not ask them to leave.
48. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 1986); Sylvia Wynter, “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and What It Is Like to Be ‘Black,’” in National Identities and Sociopolitical Changes in Latin America, ed. Mercedes F. Dúran-Cogan and Antonio Gómez-Moriana (New York: Routledge, 2001), 30–66; Browne, Dark Matters.
49. Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi, Pogrom in Gujarat (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012), 26.
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