For American Muslims, Everything Did Not Change After 9/11

For American Muslims, Everything Did Not Change After 9/11 July 5, 2012

Everything changed after 9/11.” This political mantra has become part of our national life. It is invoked to explain war-making in foreign lands, the creation of government departments such as Homeland Security, and the expansion of federal surveillance powers, both at home and abroad. In the past decade, it has also drawn special attention to the presence of Muslims in the United States. Scholars, analysts, and policy-makers have emphasized the unique nature of the threat posed either by or to Muslim Americans in the post-9/11 era. On the one hand, the administrations of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama have identified the radicalization of Muslim Americans as one of the greatest security problems faced by the United States today. On the other hand, civil libertarians, immigration activists, and progressives have decried the violations of Muslims’ civil rights in the course of prosecuting the war on terrorism. Both of these rhetorical strategies mean to call attention to the post-9/11 Muslim American. And yet, both rhetorics are also a form of forgetting, a severing of Muslim Americans from their deep roots in U.S. history.

A key theme resounds in Muslim American history: the belief that Muslim American dissent is a threat to national security. Dissent does not equal terrorism (more about that shortly), but the fear that Muslim American dissent begets violence was a concern long before 9/11. There are important similarities between pre-9/11 and post-9/11 state surveillance of Muslim Americans. For much of the twentieth century, it was not Muslim immigrants, but rather indigenous African American Muslims who were, from the point of view of federal authorities, the public and potentially dangerous face of American Islam. The parallels between earlier and later periods of state surveillance are striking. We seem to be living in a new age of consensus in which, like the late 1940s and 1950s, a vital center has identified Islamic radicalism, and by extension Muslim American dissent, as an existential problem, a dangerous expression of extremism.
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